Robert Knightly - Bodies in Winter

‘Jarazelsky,’ she finally told me, ‘was caught inside the warehouse, so he had no defense. He was alone at the time, but IAB suspected that he was part of an organized ring.’

‘Did he roll over?’ One thing about crooked cops, they usually start naming names before the cuffs go on. That would be especially true of a rat like Jarazelsky.

‘No, he lawyered up right away.’

‘You think Jarazelsky made the same mistake as David Lodge? You think he spoke to the PBA delegate, Officer Dante Russo, before he asked for that lawyer?’

‘Pete Jarazelsky and David Lodge had the same lawyer, Corbin. A man named Theodore Savio.’

Adele was rolling the words in her mouth, stumbling over the syllables in a way that reminded me of Ewa Gierek, whose existence I revealed a short time later. My description of Ewa’s milk-white skin, her invisible brows and tender years, was amusing enough to draw a genuine smile, which pleased me. By that time we were in Adele’s apartment and she was filling a suitcase with clothing, doing it one-handed. She didn’t ask for my help and I didn’t offer it.

The phone began to ring downstairs as Adele closed the latches on the suitcase. If she heard it, I couldn’t tell. She opened the drawer on her night table, took out a box and flipped off the cover, revealing a small automatic pistol. The weapon was designed to be carried in a pocket or beneath a waistband. There were no front or rear sights to snag on fabric and the shrouded hammer was buried in the gun’s frame.

Adele had shown the automatic to me when she’d first purchased it as a back-up weapon. Though it didn’t look like much, the AMT held five. 40 caliber rounds. And like all semi-automatic handguns, it could be fired as fast as you could pull the trigger.

The phone stopped in mid-ring and Adele smiled before handing the weapon to me. ‘Corbin, please, jacking a round into the chamber is beyond me at the moment.’

I took it a step further, ejecting the magazine to make sure it was full. When I handed the gun back to Adele, she tucked it into the sling covering her right arm. The weight caused her to wince slightly, the only concession to pain she’d made so far.

The sleet had turned to snow by the time we started out for Rensselaer Village and I stayed with Northern Boulevard, though I might have jumped on the Cross Island Parkway. I was in no hurry. It was Sunday night, the streets nearly empty, the snow outside thick enough to reduce the neon tubes defining the commercial landscape to smears of color that rippled across the windshield with each stroke of the wipers. A block away, the headlights of an orange sanitation truck cut across the intersection and I lifted my foot from the gas. The truck turned in front of us, exposing a rotary machine on its tail-end that spit circles of rock salt onto the asphalt. Though I kept as far from the truck as possible, pellets of salt cracked into Adele’s side of the car as we inched by.

‘Those files, they’re useful,’ I said after another long silence. ‘But maybe not in the way you think. Remember, you can’t admit you have them. Nor can we access financial records or obtain warrants of any kind.’

My remarks produced no more than a shrug. This was ground Adele had already been over and she simply changed the subject. ‘Irony,’ she observed, the word coming out: eye-own-eee. ‘Tony Szarek’s murder. If it has nothing to do with David Lodge.’

By this time, Adele knew the particulars of my day, knew that the Broom had a destitute brother who hated him and a young mistress who was suing for half of his estate. It was at least possible that one or the other (or even the good sister, Trina) had killed him. The ME’s failure to discover traces of gunpowder residue on Szarek’s hand had troubled me from the beginning. If his killer had simply touched the gun to Szarek’s palm and the inside of his fingers after it was fired, the tests would have come back positive. Cops would know that.

But even if we’d made false assumptions, if we’d been drawn to the Broom by mere coincidence, examining his life had enabled us to connect Russo, Jarazelsky, Szarek and Justin Whitlock. The Broom’s actual killer was now irrelevant.

‘They had no time to worry about the Broom,’ Adele continued. ‘David Lodge was coming out of jail bent on revenge. He had to be taken down, no matter what the risks.’ Adele reached out to lay the fingers of her left hand on my arm. Despite the bandages and raccoon eyes, her gaze was too intense for me to mistake her intentions. ‘The panic is still out there. All you have to do is stir the pot.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then somebody will come after you, Corbin, just like they came after David Lodge, just like they came after me.’

We were up on the 59th Street Bridge by then, the Island of Manhattan before us completely obscured by the snow. I watched Adele’s hand drop to her lap and her gaze return to the accumulating snow on the roadbed. ‘Corbin,’ she said.

‘What.’

‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

That brought a little smile and a change of subject. ‘How much are we supposed to get?’ Adele asked, pointing through the windshield. ‘How much snow?’

‘Three or four inches, nothing to worry about. We should be looking at temperatures in the upper forties tomorrow.’

I thought back to the day I’d ruined my loafers, the day we found DuWayne Spott. At the time, I’d been the one without a clue. Now my feet were encased in a pair of waterproof Timberland boots and Adele was wearing flat-heeled pumps. It was a neat reversal of our customary roles, and not at all unpleasant.

Adele and I began to discuss tactics and overall strategy as we drove south along Second Avenue, a discussion that continued as I carried her bags into my apartment, as I made up the bed in the spare room, as I prepared a dinner of soft-boiled eggs and buttered bread that Adele managed to get past her swollen lips. We stayed at it until nearly ten o’clock when Adele finally plucked a vial of pain killers, Percocets, from her handbag. The Percocets had been prescribed and filled at North Shore Hospital, a kindness negated by a thoughtless pharmacist who’d topped the vial with a child-resistant cap. Though it couldn’t be opened with one hand, Adele kept trying until I took the vial from her fingers.

‘You know, Adele,’ I said as I twisted the cap and shook out a round white tablet. ‘It’s OK to ask for help. Remember, no woman is an island.’

I watched Adele rise to her feet and carry the tablet into the kitchen. By this time we’d pretty much settled on our strategy and my thoughts had taken a more playful turn. Adele’s body, when in motion, had always contradicted her customary air of self-control. Far from willowy, her shoulders were relatively broad, her confident stride an unconscious echo of the fearlessness so obvious in her gaze. I followed that body into the kitchen where I almost got up the nerve to make the move I’d been dreaming about for many months. That I settled for a glimpse of the nape of her neck as she bent over the sink had nothing to do with Mel, or with a justifiable fear of the shape her rejection might take. No, the reason I didn’t press my lips to Adele’s neck sprang from a fear of acceptance. This wasn’t about a weekend rendezvous, two days of give and take before everybody goes home, the party’s over. In many ways, Adele had remained a mystery to me throughout our partnership, but there was no mistaking this piece of the puzzle. Adele Bentibi was commitment prone.

A half-hour later, Adele retreated to her room, already a little woozy, and I was off to the Y for a swim. Though I’d hoped to relax into an easy rhythm, I never did find my stroke and spent forty-five minutes thrashing around. I didn’t think about Dante Russo as I thrashed, or any of the other actors, or even about Adele. Instead, my thoughts drifted to the day Roderigo Carrabal slashed my chest on the basketball court behind the Jacob Riis Houses. At the time, we were disputing an out-of-bounds call.